Wireless communication between computing devices has enjoyed wide adoption and significant growth as a flexible and cost-effective alternative to traditional hard-wired network infrastructure. Wireless technologies such as WiFi (a common name for several related standards proposed by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, “IEEE”) and Bluetooth permit data transfer via radio signals in 2.4 GHz, 5 GHz, and other bands. New standards and improved equipment have increased data rates of wireless networks, but the technology has some issues that have not been satisfactorily addressed. Configurability and security of wireless networks are two of these.
Wireless networks rely on encryption of packets to prevent eavesdropping and unauthorized use of network resources. For example, the Wired Equivalent Policy (“WEP”), which is a part of IEEE standard 802.11 describing wireless communications, specifies the encryption to be used in WiFi networks. Likewise, Wi-Fi Protected Access (WPA) is an alternative encryption and authentication standard based on mechanisms defined in the IEEE 802.11i standard. However, products supporting WEP, WPA, and similar security standards typically are difficult to configure correctly, so wireless networks are often run in unencrypted, “open” mode. Furthermore, even when encryption is enabled on a wireless local area network (“WLAN”), the participating systems often lack a standardized way to change the security configuration. Easy-to-use, broadly-applicable procedures to configure and manage WLAN participants may be of considerable value in the field.